When shoppers fill their grocery carts, most assume that each of the foods they've chosen has been examined by an inspector employed by the government.

The FDA inspects only 2% to 3% of fresh produce entering the U.S.

By Todd Plitt, USA TODAY

But the furor raised by the discovery last month of the first case of mad cow disease in the USA masks a truth about the nation's food supply: Meat is by far the most regulated and overseen item in the grocery cart; fruits and vegetables get only a fraction of the attention.

Industry critics are concerned that produce may be the Achilles' heel in the nation's food-safety network. There are no inspections of domestically grown produce unless there is a disease outbreak.

"In the last 10 years, the amount of produce crossing the borders has skyrocketed, but inspection hasn't," says Michael Hansen, a senior researcher for Consumers Union.

The Produce Marketing Association reports that imports of fresh produce increased from 13.8 billion pounds in 1993 to 20.2 billion pounds in 2000. Of that amount, the association says, the Food and Drug Administration inspects 2% to 3%.

A number of agencies have a specialty niche in the oversight of food, but the two major players are the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the FDA.

Both agencies are under fire by advocacy groups who say, in essence, that you can drive a truck through the loopholes in their inspection programs. Since a dairy cow was found to be infected with mad cow disease last month in Washington state, the USDA in particular has been fielding criticism that its front-line inspectors are not adequately trained.

In short, the nation's food safety is overseen by a partnership that critics say is flawed — and lopsided.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 76 million people get sick, more than 300,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 die each year of diseases carried by all kinds of foods.

Though bad meat has long been considered the most dangerous item in the diet, the contamination of fruits and vegetables with deadly and antibiotic-resistant new bug strains such as E. coli O157:H7, salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes has brought them into the limelight — under which they're wilting.

Perhaps the highest-profile recent case of bad vegetables involved imported green onions that caused a large outbreak of hepatitis A in a Chi-Chi's Mexican restaurant in western Pennsylvania. More than 550 people were infected last fall, and three died.

Through the late 1990s, multi-state outbreaks of food poisoning were traced to parasites called cyclospora in Guatemalan raspberries, to salmonella-infected sprouts and to E. coli-tainted lettuce and apple cider.

The problem, according to food-safety experts, is that the USDA gets the lion's share of federal food-safety dollars for overseeing meat, poultry and processed eggs, while the FDA gets a sliver of resources for overseeing everything else.

"Agriculture has three-quarters of the food-safety budget for a quarter of the food in the food supply. FDA has one-quarter for three-quarters of our food," says Marion Nestle, a professor of food science and nutrition at New York University and author of Safe Food.

Charles Benbrook, a consultant on food safety to Consumers Union and other groups, says he's concerned not only about germs on food but also high levels of pesticides used in developing countries to kill insects.

"FDA has acknowledged for years that there's no way their current system can detect any more than a small sample of the food that comes into the country with illegal residues, especially with the huge increase of imports of winter vegetables," he says.

The food oversight system began to decentralize many years ago. In 1906, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act requiring that USDA inspectors, many of whom are veterinarians, inspect every live animal going into slaughter and every carcass.

A USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service inspector must be on site during operating hours at all 6,500 slaughterhouses and meat processing plants in the USA. Inspectors also monitor the meat line for signs of fecal matter and other problems.

Also in 1906, Congress created the Pure Food and Drugs Act. The USDA's Bureau of Chemistry was charged with sampling foods to check whether they were adulterated or misleadingly labeled. In 1930, the FDA was created within the Department of Health and Human Services, and responsibility for enforcing the Pure Food and Drugs Act moved to the new agency, splitting the nation's food-oversight system in two.

Years later, the result is that the FDA oversees seafood; cooked, canned and baked products; whole eggs; and produce, both imported and domestically grown. It also regulates what goes into animal feed and how it's labeled. And it does it with a lot less staff and money than the USDA.

The FDA's budget proposal for fiscal 2004 is $1.7 billion, including $20.5 million for food safety and counterterrorism. The USDA's budget proposal is $74 billion, including $899 million for the Food Safety and Inspection Service.

The FDA's authority and manpower have expanded as a result of counterterrorism efforts. About 1,550 inspectors are on the payroll; many are among the 900 new staffers, including lab technicians, hired in the past three years, says Robert Brackett, director of food safety in the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, on the other hand, employs more than 8,000 inspectors across the country.

All the food in the USA minus meat and poultry is a lot of food for 1,550 inspectors, Brackett acknowledges. "We've had to become much more strategic, so we focus on those products with a higher risk, by their history or by their very nature," he says.

Of the cornucopia the FDA is in charge of, the most inspected part today is food imports. FDA employees are on duty at 90 of the USA's 317 official ports of entry, up from only 40 in past years, and a new cooperating agreement with the U.S. Customs Service allows customs agents to inspect food on behalf of FDA at ports where there is no FDA staffer.

A greater problem

No amount of inspections makes up for the greater problem that food-safety advocates see with the agency: It presumes that all is well until something goes wrong.

The FDA does, in fact, require that all foods — domestic and imported — be "pure, wholesome, safe to eat and produced under sanitary conditions."

"The FDA operates a food-safety system in which the law says it is the company's responsibility to sell only safe food," says Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Consumer Federation of America's Food Policy Institute.

"The FDA assumes they meet that responsibility and only becomes actively engaged if they know there is a problem — and they usually know there is a problem because somebody got sick or there is a dead body."

In some cases, the FDA doesn't become aware of contamination until someone gets sick. An example is the imported green onions that caused a large outbreak of hepatitis A in a restaurant in western Pennsylvania last fall, infecting more than 550 people and causing three deaths.

"We'd normally pay more attention to fresh uncooked product," Brackett says, "but we had no reason to suspect those products would be contaminated until we did see an adverse event."

Spreading the blame

A similar charge — not having direct authority over the companies it oversees — also is frequently directed at the USDA.

While it's true that the USDA doesn't have the authority to force recalls or shut down plants, inspectors can withhold the agency's inspection stamp, making it impossible for the plant to process meat. Critics say that is a convoluted way of being in charge, but Garry McKee, administrator of the Food Safety and Inspection Service, counters that it works.

"We have the authority to remove our inspectors if there's a problem within the plant, so we can then really require the company to make changes that are necessary," he says. In 2003, the agency shut down more than 127 plants for violating their HCCP plans.

HCCP — Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points — is a program used by the FDA and the USDA requiring each food production facility to identify the places where contamination or infection might occur and then create systems that monitor those points to make sure it doesn't happen.

Now that mad cow has been found in the United States, USDA is adopting a tougher stance. The agency tests an estimated 25,000 cows out of 35 million slaughtered each year, which was considered a "statistically valid sample" in pre-mad-cow days.

In Europe, which has a long history with mad cow, all cows sent to slaughter older than 30 months are tested for the disease, which doesn't manifest until cattle are 3 to 4 years old. In Japan, every cow sent to slaughter is tested, regardless of age.

USDA Secretary Ann Veneman has pledged to enhance the nation's mad cow surveillance system and adopt a national animal identification system to enable the agency to react more quickly to food-borne outbreaks of all kinds. The agency also has said it will increase the number of cows tested to 40,000 per year.

So what's next?

Bringing the two agencies together has long been the holy grail of food-safety experts. The government's own General Accounting Office has issued numerous reports calling for the creation of a single agency to protect the food supply, but interagency turf wars have held that concept at bay.

FDA's Brackett cautions that while Americans may be hearing more about food-safety issues, "it's important to realize that food safety is broadening in terms of what we're looking for because of advances in science. We're finding more things that could be food-safety problems than may have existed 20 or 30 years ago."